Tell it Like it Is
by Norman Grubb

This first chapter of Who Am I?, by Norman Grubb, describes his life-long search to understand and be able to share with others the glorious truth of who we are in Christ.

Why am I starting to write again? I will jump right in and “tell it like it is” from the beginning. It is because years ago in my late teens dissatisfaction with my life and the challenge of a friend confronted me with what I had long been taught from the Scriptures–that I was eternally lost and deserved to be, unless I had received Christ as my personal Saviour. I did that the same night, and in my heart I had the inner witness. Because Jesus’ blood had been shed for me, then my sins were forgiven and God was my Father, and I was going to heaven, not hell. A joy I had never known before was in my heart, and Jesus had become a living Saviour to me. This was life–eternal life. But it was only the beginning of the answer.

I gradually began to find that there is a difference between the sun at dawn and the sun at midday, and I began a pursuit, like Lancelot and the Holy Grail. I wanted what could be a total answer for me, a full satisfaction, a rational meaning to all life, a fool-proof workable key to daily living, a road map which I could unfold to a fellow-traveler and say, “This is the way.” And for myself I daringly say the Grail has been found, and the midday sun does shine; and it is no longer a matter of searching, but of exciting fresh explorations of this “Promised Land.”
Long ago the Psalmist asked, “What is man?” And it is a fair question. The Greeks said, “Know thyself”: and let’s face the fact–all we have is ourselves, and we had better know in the fullest way who we are and why we are, and how we can be ourselves and what our destiny is.

I have dug around these vital questions in several former short books, which are still–surprisingly to me–in circulation. They have been written over the past thirty years, and were an attempt to share what understandings I had at the time. It is not a question of wanting to take back what I then wrote, no indeed not, but only of, to me, increasing clarification. Truth is simple, that is why Jesus spoke so simply. The complications stem from our partial understandings and therefore partial explanations; and I hope this may simplify a little more what those other books have said–The Law of Faith: The Liberating Secret: The Deep Things of God: God Unlimited: The Spontaneous You. I have not reread them, and doubtless I shall repeat things said in them. I had better hide under Peter’s umbrella: “I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them and be established in the present truth! And well I know we are mere paddlers in the ocean of the “unsearchable riches of Christ,” with hardly a toe in the water yet, as we shall surely realize when the day comes in which we “shall know even as we are known.”
I like always to repeat and underline that the Scriptures have always been the final authority to me, ever since fifty years ago, when taking a theological course for my undergraduate studies at Cambridge, I was greatly disturbed at some of the liberal viewpoints which undercut the facts as related in the Old Testament; and I made a personal decision in my room, rather dramatically maybe, on my knees with my hand on the Bible, that Christ having become so personally real to me, I would stand without compromise on accepting the Scriptures as evidently He did. I haven’t, by God’s grace, changed nor desired to change in these succeeding years, but rather all the time see ever greater depths of the ultimate of revelation in them.